First opened Tuesday, March 20, 2012
洒落る
しゃれる
- flat (heiban)
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
to joke, to play on words; stylish
Shareru may be a semantic shift from 曝れる (shareru), or derive from the classical verb 戯る (saru), and is first cited to a text from 1660.
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
In a sentence
彼女しゃれた格好してるね。
She's smartly dressed.
君はそのシャツを着るとしゃれてみえる。
You look smart in the shirt.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
Not settled
Wiktionary itself hedges on part of this word's origin — those lines are marked below.
- “Semantic shift from 曝(しゃ)れる (shareru), itself a phonetic shift from 曝(さ)れる (sareru).”
- Hedged“Alternatively, derived from the classical lower bigrade conjugation verb 戯(さ)る (saru), from which 戯(ざ)れる (zareru) is also derived.”
- “First cited to a text from 1660.”
Source: Wiktionary: 洒落る (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- Sound change
- The pronunciation shifted over the centuries.
- Meaning shift
- The word's meaning moved away from where it started.
- Ateji
- Kanji chosen for their sound or sense after the word existed.